Bangalore

Technology has always been a helping hand for industry leaders in reducing the cost and complexity, making improved products and develop a new business model. But the current wave of industry disruption is loaded with terms such as IoT, agile, CX, robotic process automation, AR/VR, blockchain, mobility, machine learning, connected devices, and digital ecosystems that possess new opportunities as well as challenges for a practitioner to prepare themselves for the digital age.

BA Convention 2018 will have industry leaders to talk about these disruptive technologies and how one can solve complex business problems with the help of these technologies.

Ken FulmerPresident and Chief Executive Officer International Institute of Business Analysis

Prior to joining IIBA, Ken was a Management Consultant and IT Executive Advisor. He was formerly CIO at Delek US and the Chief Technology Officer at Sunoco, Inc.- a Fortune 500 Oil Company. Ken had been with Sunoco for over 25 years, in various positions within the Information Technology field

His responsibilities as CTO included managing the Project Management Office (PMO), managing the IT planning and application architecture, and leading the practice area for Business Analysis. Ken was deeply involved in Commercial Product and ERP implementations, Refinery, Supply Chain, and Retail systems in the Downstream Oil and Petrochemical industry. Ken has an undergraduate degree from LaSalle University, and has an MBA from Clarion University.

Ken served on the Board of IIBA (from 2011-2016) and was on the Executive Committee and the Audit and Risk Committee. Ken has also been active on the teams involved with Strategy Development and with the Business Model initiative at IIBA. Most recently he held the position of Chairman of the Board of IIBA.

Michael is an influential leader in Business Analysis. His passionate involvement in building successful professional communities has led him to a long term board director role on the global board of IIBA where he has had a central role in developing strategy. After joining the board in 2010, Michael served as Chair from 2014 to 2016.

Following a career in project delivery spanning many different delivery and general management roles, Michael co-founded a successful consulting company which led to stock exchange public listing in 2007. The consultancy was later acquired by UXC / CSC.

In recent years, Michael has returned to Business Analysis leadership roles through coaching, mentoring and leading capability uplift programs.

Dr Cecily Macdougall is Founder and Managing Director of Building4Business Pty Ltd, which specializes in the Strategy-to-Execution Process (SXP). Cecily is a recognised expert in why transformation programs fail, early recognition of failure, and how to re-establish them. Cecily has found that SXP is the missing link needed to build the foundations for successful strategic change/transformational programs.

Cecily has proven that the core skill needed to conduct Strategy to Execution is Strategic Business Analysis and that Strategic Business Analysis is key to program success!

Lalit Desiraju as Senior Director of CAPGEMINI CONSULTING in India, is responsible for building and executing Digital strategy for Capgemini's global and Indian clients. Lalit has a track record of more than 17 years of building high performance teams & executing on customer success focusing on Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence and CIO Advisory offerings for global client base

An active industry speaker, blogger and recipient of the World Women Leadership Award for her dynamic leadership, Shantha believes in creating a new legacy for business growth.
With an extensive experience of more than 20 years in sales, strategy, M&A, innovation and delivery across the Retail, Consumer Goods, Travel, Health and Life Sciences sectors, Shantha has spearheaded several client transformation projects.
She holds an Executive MBA from Symbiosis, Pune and a B.E. from PSG College, Coimbatore. She is also a certified Program Manager from the Stanford University, USA.
Her leisure time makes the ambitious adventurer practice yoga and running as well as volunteer for social causes including teaching the underprivileged children.

Sanjeev has been with ABB for about 30 years and has grown his leadership perspective in diverse global roles with base in Europe and Asia.
Sanjeev is an electrical and telecommunications engineer and with management education at IMD Switzerland and INSEAD. He is known for having shaped many ABB businesses into high growth trajectory in his tenure. He is a relentless change driver with current focus on Industry 4.0, Digitalisation, Electric Mobility and Smart technologies for smart grids and cities.

Ashish Mehta is a seasoned leader with over 23 years of experience in leading global IT consulting and business analysis practice. A recognized thought-leader in the business analysis, Ashish has worked with clients globally to establish highly effective Business Analysis and IT Consulting disciplines, enabling the delivery of solutions to business and technical problems. Ashish leads IIBA’s Global Thought Leadership initiative to ensure relevance of business analysis in fast paced business and technology environment. Ashish is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®) and a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt.

In his previous assignment, Ashish was a Vice President and Global Practice Head – Business Analysis at NTT DATA Inc. where he established a unique business analysis practice model – a $50M book of business with 350 consultants. Ashish has consulted in multiple domains like BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, Airline, Travel, Manufacturing and Public Sector.

Awarded by IIBA for his dedication and commitment to business analysis profession, Ashish has volunteered with IIBA for a decade in different roles including Global Board of Director. His efforts have resulted into exceptional expansion of IIBA in India Region in the areas of corporate and individual memberships, chapters and academic collaborations. A committed and passionate business analysis visionary, Ashish frequently authors, advises and speaks on business analysis at various conferences internationally, and is dedicated to the growth of the business analysis profession
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A seasoned leader in global technology delivery with over 24 years of experience in helping large financial services firms solve complex business problems using technology. He has a deep understanding of the Banking and Capital Markets Industry across the macroeconomic, regulatory, changing customer demography and disruptive technology aspects. He holds Post Graduation in Software Enterprise Management from IIM, Bangalore and an Engineering degree in Electronics & Communication from Karnataka University. He loves teaching industry topics, mentoring and coaching people to help them achieve their full potential

With the passion for continuously delighting the customers in an enterprise product space, Shalini has been a part of the Financial Technology domain for a large part of the last 2 decades. She has built a thriving community of product managers and business analysts in Broadridge Financial Solutions, and is running the India Product and BA Center of Excellence. She has led several industry-wide initiatives in the capital markets and institutional trading space, working across the globe, and has been part of the Broadridge’s exciting industry and thought leadership era. She has had a rich experience of leading multi-cultural, multi-dimensional teams and developing exciting multi-market facing solutions serving global customers.

She is an engineer and a thinker at heart, strategic leader by profession and curious overall.

As Chief Administrative Officer and Country Head at UST Global, Alex is responsible for Corporate Functions, Emerging markets, Semiconductor and Global public sector business of UST Global.

Prior to joining UST Global, he held various leadership roles and served many large corporations in service delivery, consulting, establishing offshore development centers and managing mergers and acquisitions across the globe. Alex holds several important positions in Government agencies, academic institutions and trade bodies in India.

• Chairman for GTECH- An industry body of all Technology companiesCharter member of TiE Kerala
• Former member of the National IT Services council for NASSCOM and the regional council
• Member of the State council for Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Kerala State.
• Board member for ICT Academy, a company set up by the Government of Kerala
• Governing board member of various academic councils and education institutions.

Leadership team of AMCHAM Kerala (American Chamber of Commerce) and has been recognized by the US Consulate recently, Chennai for his efforts in promoting US-India trade

Suresh Krishna Pai, Senior Director – Data and Analytics at UST Global. Suresh has global consulting experience assisting customers on matters related to data management, data engineering and Insight engineering. He has evolved his career from business analyst to managing P&L for data services in last 16 years. Suresh has consulted customer across broad range of industry vertical such as healthcare, life science, manufacturing , energy & utility, banking and financial service, public sector and government agencies. He enjoys accelerating possibilities for his clients leverage their data assets.

Veena has extensive experience in banking and banking products over a career spanning 25 years. Veena started her career with India’s leading private sector bank, ICICI Bank Ltd, where she built skills in banking across project finance, corporate banking, forex treasury and relationship banking functions.
She joined the IT sector as a domain consultant in early 2003, managing presales for FLEXCUBE at i-flex solutions (now Oracle Financial Services) where she built a repertoire of specialized skills in banking product presales.
Veena moved on to HCL Technologies in 2006 to launch the product incubation unit for banking. She also managed the Domain Excellence team for strategic banking clients at HCL, before joining Misys (now Finastra).
Veena currently heads product management at Finastra and is responsible for managing product strategy for its Connected Corporate Banking Solution.
A Chartered Accountant, Cost Accountant and US CPA by qualification and training, Veena has morphed from accounting to banking to IT, adapting herself at each stage, to the needs and challenges of her career, as it evolved.
Veena is passionate about grooming women into leadership roles and is running the Finastra Community Networks program as part of its Diversity and Inclusion program. Veena is also an active speaker at conferences and has presented at various Zinnov and IIBA Conferences in the past.

Ramesh Revuru is Head- Digital Integration @ LTI. He has 22 years of experience working with both product development and IT services companies. He is author of two well researched books "That’s I.T" & “Get the software job”. His articles are published in popular IT magazines like Profit, eBIZQ & SCENE. His article on SOA was ranked among TOP 10 articles by Profit (Oracle) magazine.

Speaker at conferences including TIBCO Conference, Annual IP summit, COLLABORATE, OAUG UK & GITEX. Trained in Power Speaking™. Before joining LTI, he was Chief Delivery Officer @ Minacs and also served with Oracle, Infosys and Computer Associates. He is BE (Electronics), MS (Software Engineering), MBA (Operations Research), and Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Stanford University).

Sushant is a Partner with KPMG’s Management Consulting practice, leading firm’s agenda on Digital in Consumer sector. He is passionate about evolving business models, and innovation in the eCommerce, Internet economy, Consumer and related areas. In the last 14 years with KPMG, he has extensively worked on the boardroom agenda pertaining to Growth, operating mode, efficiency and customer experience. He has extensively worked with Fortune 500 clients in Europe, Mid-east as well as Asia Pacific region. He has been active contributor to industry forums like CII, FICCI etc; and remains focused on contributing back to the professional and social community.

Ashutosh serves the CIO role and leads the India team that guides Business Technology (BT) and Marketing & Strategy Professionals. Ashutosh specializes in the area of BT and provides strategic guidance and advice to clients in the areas of digital business, cloud, mobility, big data, emerging technologies, sourcing, and contract management.

Ashutosh has worked in various roles at leading consulting and IT services firms. Most recently he was with Infosys advising aerospace and automotive clients in the US. Prior to that, he spent close to nine years at Cognizant consulting for major retail and consumer goods organizations in North America and Asia Pacific.

Ashutosh completed his postgraduate diploma in business management from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a Bachelor of Technology in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi.

Sowmya is an accomplished Life Sciences Executive with over 20 years of business experience and extensive leadership in driving new solutions and competencies, product management and business development for both large and start up organizations in the Life Sciences industry. In his current role at Accenture he is the Life Sciences Industry Lead

Manikandan Seran (Mani) is a leader with 23 years of experience across Engineering and IT industry. He moved into IT as SAP consultant and has played multiple roles in delivery with Indian and global Clients delivering and managing projects, programs and large portfolios across all project lifecycles including transformation programs.Mani joined Shell in 2016 and is an active player in Shell’s IT transformation journey that focusses on building a capable team in Bangalore and enhance internal ways of working including Agile for faster time to value to the business. In his current role he manages 500+ applications with a team that is spread across 17+ countries and a landscape that has many niche suppliers and technologies across project delivery, Information management, Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestment.
Mani has played multiple key client facing roles, transformation programs, skills and capability development, managing a portfolio from design to delivering value in his experience.

Jibu George is UST’s practice director for Digital Service Innovation team. He is Responsible for leading the new service offerings in AI and Automation for the customers across different industries ensuring sustainable benefits. In his current role, he is responsible for sales and delivery of various AI / innovative solutions. Jibu is part of the IT Services industry for last 20 years playing different technology leadership roles. He is experienced in consulting, design and delivery of technology solutions to customers. He holds a Master’s Degree in Information Technology.

Pavan Valluri is the Director at CGI with responsibility of New Product Innovation, Development and, Product Leadership. He Serves as Business Architect for GWCM suite of products from India. Prior to Joining CGI, Pavan, in his 18 years of experience, has worked in Senior Positions in Product Companies designing and developing products. He has worked with Finacle, an Infosys Product Wing, Intellect Wealth Management Suite and Oracle.

He has also served the wealth management industry as a Wealth Advisor and was Regional Head for Private Banking for renowned Private Banks (ICICI and Kotak Mahindra) in India.

Asheesh is the Global Agile Transformation leader at Shell, working towards bringing Enterprise agility to the organization.

Asheesh loves to work with cross functional teams, challenge their minds, and aims to inspire most! Asheesh is an expert in managing large scale organizational change, where he builds organizational warriors, fighting the enterprise battles and untangling the complex structures and the dark forces holding back the true enterprise potential. He has more than two decades of experience working with the energy, financial services, and utility spaces and leading transformation change journeys from Start-ups to Fortune 100 organizations.

Asheesh has been speaking publicly since 2010 on Organizational Agility, Lean, Devops, Software Engineering and you can find his thoughts at http://agilejourneys.com/ and tweets at @amehdiratta

Saptorsi Hore is the Head of Operations / COO for ThoughtWorks India, being responsible for operational business planning, strategic planning, professional services management - people management, recruitment, staffing, training and immigration, financial management and reporting, portfolio management, demand management and administration. He is a member of the global operations leadership team.
He is a senior management professional with 19+ years in the IT industry having proven his expertise in managing client relationships, delivering large technology programs, grooming leaders and in setting up and heading business operations.
He has played a variety of roles in ThoughtWorks like that of the Market Principal for the EU offshore market, Program Director, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Client Principal, Program Manager, Delivery Manager, General Manager for the Gurgaon office, setting up the Analytics practice and General Manager for the Bangalore office.
He has around 15 years of experience in delivering software projects in an distributed model, with 11 years in delivering projects using Agile methodologies.
He graduated from IIT Kharagpur and did his MBA from IIM Calcutta.

Amol is Manager at Capgemini Consulting and a part of Digital Transformation Institute - Capgemini's research team on all things digital. Amol leads research pursuits in key areas such as - artificial intelligence, digital customer experience, data privacy, and blockchain among others.

Mahesh PrabhuVP, Global Head of Innovation ITC InfotechAs Head of Innovation, his primary focus is on building innovative solutions using IOT, Chatbots, AI, AR-VR, etc. World class evaluations, experimentation, research & innovations happen at ITC Infotech's INNORUPTION Labs. Prior to this, he incubated the Technology Consulting Group - premier technology services for key customers.

In a career spanning over 20 years, Prabhu has received many industry accolades including:
- The Economic Times CIO award
- CIO & Leader Business Impact award

In his earlier role as the Head of MS practice, he grew ITC Infotech’s Microsoft Practice into one of the largest Tech Practices within ITC Infotech & achieved highest level of partner recognition from Microsoft. He was instrumental in achieving Gold Certification within a year of taking over the practice & further expanded to achieve 7 Gold competencies and 1 Silver competency. He built many Centers of Excellence from grounds-up, such as SharePoint, Dynamics and Mobility CoE.

Prabhu is passionate about productivity improvements; he has instituted processes & frameworks to increase automation in SDLC processes, improve use of reusable components & best practices, provide agility to software projects. 30 to 85% improvements have been achieved in different initiatives.

A technology enthusiast & evangelist, Prabhu has been instrumental in incubation of cutting-edge technologies, research & innovation, & broad-basing the capability enhancement programs.

Prabhu has led the strategic IT initiatives of the company like Knowledge Management & Collaboration, Strategic Planning, CRM, etc. He has also made valuable contributions to
other organizational initiatives like defining the metrics & measurement programs, career
development plans, job banding...

Sneha has built many products and her expertise is in getting products to market efficiently - where customers get the most value. She has played the roles of a developer, a business analyst, a project manager and a product manager. She is also passionate about mentoring and has led training programs for graduate hires of ThoughtWorks, globally. She strongly believes that BAs are in the best position to leverage the best of technology advancements and lead the evolution of businesses.

Saurabh is heading the Microsoft Visio product team. Saurabh has ~15 years of extensive experience in the software development industry, where he has led a team of Business Analysts for a top tier hedge fund, driven process re-engineering and application portfolio management projects for leading financial services organizations, and led several software product development initiatives. He has studied at the Indian School of Business (ISB), IIT- BHU, and loves data and process visualization.

Shashank, currently working as a program manager in Microsoft Visio product team, has ~5 years of experience and drives data-driven visualization capabilities in Visio. He has extensively worked on new innovations around Process Visualizations in the product. He has completed his MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur and is passionate about empowering users in being more productive

Praveen brings 17 years of rich experiences in all facets of Business Analysis and Design Thinking. Praveen is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®) from International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and Certified Professional in Requirements Engineering (CPRE) from International Requirements Engineering Board.

Praveen has a passion for training, coaching and consulting. With over 8 years of experience in training, Praveen completely believes in the philosophy of “experiential learning”. He has created (and delivered) several impactful “learn by doing” workshop, that have received very positive feedback from participants.

Over the last six years, Praveen has personally coached over 2500 students and professionals on various aspects of Design Thinking and Business Analysis. For a year in 2017, Praveen worked for IIBA as their Program Manager, tasked with the responsibility to develop course material for MBA students.

Praveen is also a co-author of very recently released whitepaper by IIBA i.e. Digital Business Analysis: Crossing the Chasm from traditional to digital world –IIBA Global Thought Leadership Series 2018

Ananta is a business analysis practitioner with over a decade of experience in business strategy, IP development, digital and IT solution development in Financial Services, Insurance, Health and Life Sciences domains. Ananta is a Certified Professional in Requirements Engineering from International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB) and a member of International Institute of Business Analysis(IIBA®).

In his previous engagement, Ananta was a business analysis practice lead for NTT DATA Inc., where he has contributed extensively to practice governance, thought leadership, sales support, business analysis IP and service design. In this capacity, Ananta has coached and mentored consultants in all aspects of business analysis.

Committed to the growth of business analysis discipline, Ananta contributes to multiple business analysis forums and conducts boot camps for business analysis professionals and academic institutions.

As a passionate entrepreneur, he is on a mission to put a positive dent
in this world. He has a unique 15+ years background in leadership,strategic planning, product management- Software and Hardware, Sales and Marketing Operations, Business Architecture, Design, Manufacturing which allows him to view solutions from a holistic perspective. His laser focus execution has enabled more than double digits growth (multi-million dollar ROI) for all the ventures he served. He was also a Research Assistant in one of the most prestigious schools in Asia- Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai). He holds Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from Mumbai University and Dual Masters degree from the State University of New York/Cornell University-Mechanical Engineering & Masters degree from San Jose State University-Biomedical Devices. He also holds Business-Continued Studies from Stanford University. He is also Cisco Gold Certified Business Architect and PMP certified. He is an active partner at SGLab.us & Advisor to nuRealtor LLC. He also has a passion for doodling with his comical strip tuuktukk intended to bring out the lighter
side to any serious topics.

Aditya is the Founder/ CEO of FirstHive. He started the company in India with the firm belief that the nation responsible for one sixth of the world’s population should also be responsible for more than its fair share of technology innovation. His stewardship has helped FirstHive to carve a name for itself in the marketing technology industry, delivering ROI to some of the world’s largest brands on their marketing initiatives.
Aditya started his career with Proctor and Gamble (P&G), where he played a pivotal role in turning around a loss making market into a profitable one in a record time, which then became the highest growth area for P&G. From there he moved on to join iGate, global technology and consulting solutions provider, in London where he was responsible for UK and Western Europe region, before moving back to India to set up the organisation. Aditya completed his Bachelors in Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) Hyderabad and holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from IIM-Ahmedabad.

Artificial Intelligence technologies have been the talk of the town recently, owing to the sheer potential these have shown to change the world for good - one industry at a time. Sachin Jaiswal, the man in lead at the Flagbearer of AI startups in India - Niki.ai, has a coinciding belief in the possibilities with AI technologies.
Sachin is a firm believer in the power of technology and its applications to solve problems, simplify things and build businesses at scale. In an attempt to solve e-commerce and simplify the overall experience to bring the next billion online, Sachin created Niki.ai, with three of his friends in 2015.

After graduating from IIT Kharagpur in the stream of Electrical Engineering, and having worked with Oracle as a Product Manager for around a year, and then beginning with his entrepreneurial journey by co-founding Innovaccer - a Silicon Valley headquartered healthcare analytics company where he worked for 3 years and saw it scale to over 200 employees; Sachin brings with himself a diverse and vast experience across different business functions which steadily contribute to the growth trajectory of his current venture, Niki.ai.
Sachin leads the Product Development and Strategy at the company. His vision for the organisation, key initiatives and inputs in deciding the product roadmap, have not only helped with a continuous and non-linear growth, but have also paved the path for the future in line with the core aim behind the venture - Transforming online shopping experience for millions, by simplifying it to a universal single chat window interface with Niki being present everywhere and for every Digital Transaction, and just a simple text away.
The CEO at Niki.ai also believes that a successful company is built by a great team which is built by a great organisation culture. He has played a key role in building Team Niki which stands at over 40+ members right now, majority comprising of people in technical roles. Over the few years, building a fulfilling onboarding and training process has also helped the team members grow with a steep learning curve, and become extremely efficient contributing to building and making Niki better with each passing day.

Ashok in his role as Senior Business Architect at VMware works on developing capabilities roadmap for based on enterprise strategy. He has more than 15 years of global experience in IT roadmap planning, leading large business transformation programs and implementing complex systems. Ashok has worked with PwC, IBM and Cognizant in past and led transformation programs across various industries like Consumer Product Goods, Manufacturing, High-Tech and Chemical. He is an alumnus of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur.

Anirban has 15+ years of global exposure in Business Transformation, Capability Planning, Process Consulting, Process Re-engineering, Business Delivery & Operations, Business and Data Analysis, Process and Systems Design & Setup, Lean Six Sigma and Business Intelligence. In his tenure, he has led complex, large, global teams for transformation & delivery execution in complex multicultural, and multilingual environment. He has worked with multinationals corporations like Mphasis, HP Inc., HP Enterprise, and VMware.

As a Product management professional, Mustameer helps Enterprises take business opportunities from an idea stage to commercial success. He has successfully leveraged upon various business, technology, and product management acumens to overcome multiple business challenges across geographies by influencing, negotiating, and nudging key stakeholders towards key business outcomes and success. He is currently the Global Product Manager with SAP Solution Manager and Focused Run Solutions and drives the strategy and the product definitions.

A Product Manager with ThoughtWorks. Passionate about technology and a customer-first mindset, she believes that the successful organisation of tomorrow will be one that is agile and responsive to this ever changing world. And believes that BAs, with their ability to manage change, will be key contributors to an organisations's success.

Saumya Chandra - A creative technology consultant who believes in solving business problems through technology by building scalable products through Disruptive thinking, Agile practices and Product leadership. When I am not thinking disruptive I am mostly reading, cycling, swimming or socializing.